A brother Quack this year issued the following notice: "John Poley, at Broken-wharf, over-against the Water-mill in Thames-street, next door to the Bell, will undertake to cure any smokey chimneys. No cure, no money."

I very much doubt whether even the lowest class of ignorants would be deceived at present by the ensuing impudent falsehood. "Whereas it has been industriously reported, that Doctor Herwig, who cures madness and most distempers by sympathy, has left England, and returned to Germany: This is to give notice, that he lives at the same place, viz. at Mr. Gagelman's, in Suffolk-street, Charing-cross, about the middle of the street, over-against the green balcony."

The reader will undoubtedly admire the modesty of Mr. Bartlett, who, in 1704, advertised, "Bartlett's inventions of Steel Trusses, Instruments, Medicines, and methods to cure Ruptures and other faults of those parts, and to make the weak strong, and crooked strait, most of which I could help with the twentieth part of the trouble and charge occasioned only by delay. I reduce desperate ruptures in a few minutes, though likely to be mortal in a few hours, and have made the only true discovery of cause and cure.

Infants and others born so, and to men of fifty or sixty years, in a few weeks cured. I sell strait stockings, collars, and swings, and such like things. Advice and medicines to the poor gratis."

Of all the inventions for the amendment and recovery of the human frame from disease and death, none equals the Dutch stiptick, seriously mentioned in the Supplement, printed by John Morphew, April 27, 1709; but which I suspect proceeded from the waggish pen of Mr. Bickerstaff, or some other wit, who sent their effusions to the publisher of the Tatler. "There is prepared by a person of quality in Holland a stiptick water; for the receipt of which, exclusive of all others, the French King has offered 150,000 pistoles; but the proprietor refused to take the same. It was tried upon a Hen, before his Grace the Duke of Marlborough, on board the Peregrine galley. The feathers being all plucked from her head, a large nail was drove through her brains, gullet, tongue, &c. and fastened her head to a table, where it was left near a minute; after which, drawing out the nail and touching the part immediately with the aforesaid stiptick, she was laid upon the deck, and in half an hour's time recovered, and began to eat bread. Several as extraordinary experiments have been made upon dogs, cats, calves, lambs, and other animals, by cutting their guts in several places, the nut

of the thigh, and other parts; and it is affirmed, that this stiptick cures any part of the body, except the heart or bladder."

John Marten, with his "Attila of the Gout," and specifick, seemed determined in 1712, to expel that disorder from every human body in the Kingdom. Those who in 1807 read his advertisement, and are not thenceforward converts, must be stubborn unbelievers indeed. "I should be wanting (saith Mr. Marten) as well to the publick as myself, did I not reveal the stupendious effects of my specifick in the gout, which daily experience more and more confirms. And whatever mean opinion any who are strangers to its excellency may entertain of it, either through unbelief, or being prejudiced by those whose interest it is to explode it; let them remember, I tell them (as will many reputable people I will refer them to who have tried it), that if they ever expect certain and speedy relief, without the least detriment to their healths, they must have it. I say they must, because the surprising benefit all receive by it indicates that nothing else can more intimately dilute, and friendly and instantly obtrude and subdue by its soft balmy alterative nature, the acrimony of the humours that distend and torture the joints, and gently lead them away by urine, the only sensible operation it has. And as it is a medicine that will make its own way, it cannot but come (by

degrees) to be as universally used and approved of in that distemper, as the Jesuits' bark is for agues, if not more; for none that shall drink it in time will ever be confined a day with the gout, nor others continue in pain an hour after drinking it, though they have lain for weeks together upon the wreck. Any may be further satisfied, and have all objections answered, by word of mouth, or by consulting the book I lately published, intituled, "The Attila of the Gout," being a peculiar account of that distemper, in which the vanity of all that has hitherto been writ and practised to remove it, and an infallible method to cure it, are demonstrated; with ample testimonies of patients cured by John Marten, Surgeon, in Hatton-garden."

I have before observed, that every profession has its Quacks, or persons who deviate from established rules. Such was the Quack writer who inserted the ensuing advertisement in the Evening Post of January 22, 1717. "Whereas a certain pretender to Penmanship has, in an illeterate manner, fell upon my late performance, let him know I look down upon him, yet thus give him his answer: if I did keep monsters for my diversion, that does not affect me in my art; and it is well known that I have not now a deformed creature in my house, which is more than he can say while he is within doors. I pass by the unworthy reflections on my N and O, which I could return

upon his R and T; but his own ink will blacken him enough, while it appears in his own irregular scrawls.